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TIMESTAMPS

Here's a distilled re-telling of something I wrote fifteen years ago
in a letter to Loyd Blankenship, and related nonsense I was spouting on
convention panels and in emails with friends and colleagues for a few years
thereafter.

As you'll see, it's pretty innocuous. Like the Necronomicon or
Monty Python's Killer Joke, it's something that's only sinister if you
keep it off-stage. I never intended for it to be sinister, it just
became so because well, mainly because one of the nice folks who attended
one of the convention panels never forgot it, and brought it up every now
and then online. He even offered to pay me to write it into an article,
once (guess I should've taken the offer - d'oh). Also, a few colleagues
(Bruce Baugh on one occasion, I think, and recently Kenneth Hite) have
talked about it to others.

So why is it finally here? We'll get to that after. Here goes:

If we examine the games and game-worlds that have come and gone, patterns
emerge and it becomes easy to spot dozens of elements shared by those with
the widest appeal. Here are five I consider crucial:

The
value of cliché  the use of stock imagery and other familiar
elements  is accessibility and mutual understanding. If the Game Master
tells you the new campaign is to be set in the "Duchy of Crows"
and concerns an evil priest gathering the Hill Ogres to his cause, that
may sound a bit threadbare, but it also provides a reliable common ground.
Everyone can jump right in and focus on what the game is really
about: the PCs and their adventures. If, by contrast, the GM tells you
the new campaign takes place in the Shining Tertiary Plane of Tsalvanithra,
a science-fantasy blend of Mayan mythology, Depression-era satire, 16th-century
French politics and Japanese courtly manners, you're in for some research
before you dare put a mark on the character sheet. The most popular games
rely on stock images as a language for skipping to the good parts
(and for sharing in a celebration of things gamers enjoy celebrating).
Games that make a point of shunning cliché tend to be more niche.

Nothing's
very dramatic (or funny, or scary) without some kind of conflict, and RPGs
thrive on every sort. But the specific value of combat depends as
much on game-structure as the visceral appeal of a fight scene. In gameable
terms, most forms of conflict are best defined as a single instant (sneaking
past a guard, casting a healing spell) we gain nothing by breaking the
action down into its component steps, because the steps themselves are
seldom infused with drama without forcing the issue. But in a fight
 whether it's swordplay, a tavern brawl, a superhero slugfest or a psychic
showdown  every swing of fist or sword, every blast of energy, is something
dangerous and potentially important. That packs a fight with a series
of choices and consequences, providing fertile ground for enjoyable game
mechanics. What's more, it provides a stage on which the PCs can cooperate
and act as a team. Only a few other kinds of action can rival this under
the right conditions, and none can trump it with any consistency.

RPGs
are an ensemble medium; the core experience is that of a fellowship
of PCs cooperating (more or less) toward a common goal. The most successful
RPGs embrace this, provide tools to enhance the group experience, and build
system and setting assumptions around it. This means providing for variety,
both in terms of character concepts and their viability (it's well and
good to say you can play a Librarian, but the game-world must also provide
opportunities and challenges appropriate to the Librarian's skills). This
element skews the genre-leanings of successful RPGs to some extent, because
there are some popular genres (espionage and mysteries, most notably) that
require some re-tooling before they comfortably support the concept of
a half-dozen diverse PCs working together. Similarly, some stock character
types (lone-wolf vigilantes, burglars, assassins) become notably chummier
in RPGs, seen more often clubbing with a team than brooding indulgently
in the shadows. RPGs gain a lot of mileage and color from the ubiquity
of "strange bedfellows."

RPGs
need rules at the table level, but they thrive on anarchy at the
character level. The most successful RPGs are built on the assumption that
 once the adventure is in full swing  the PCs are on their own, free
to make their own solutions. Games that impose chains of command, or require
PCs to check with "headquarters" before they do anything questionable,
limit their audience in the process. Even a Call of Cthulhu session
set in the straight-laced reality of 1920's New England is traditionally
an exercise in the ritual abolition of order In the early stages of the
adventure, it's all urbane wit and let's-call-the-police, but once the
tentacles start dragging people screaming into the dark, propriety and
legality evaporate to irrelevance, and it's an anarchic fight for survival
and sanity. Games with a military or pseudo-military premise likewise benefit
from this kind of collapse. This taps into what may be the most unique
feature of RPGs: tactical infinity. In Chess, the White Queen can't
sweet-talk a Black Knight into leaving her be; in Squad Leader,
a group of soldiers can't sneak through an occupied village dressed as
nuns. In an RPG, you really can try anything you can think of, and
that's a feature that thrives on anarchy.

The
quality of enigma is  inevitably  the most elusive of these elements.
In literal terms, it means any quality of the game-world that the Game
Master is presumed to understand on a level the players never can. In many
worlds, this means magic. In others, it may mean an alien society
freshly met from another galaxy, or the labyrinthine mysteries of conspiratorial
politics. Beyond the enduring appeal of a mystery, this is a quiet, foundational
tool for the Game Master, who can exploit this consensual "shadow
zone" as a spawning ground for scenarios that play fun even
if they wouldn't otherwise make sense, and a place where plot-threads can
vanish if they become distracting instead of exciting. From within the
enigma the GM can pluck both questions and answers, making adventure design
and campaign management less of a chore. The benefits to a game's appeal
are vast, because any RPG that eases a GM's stage-fright (and opens up
his creative latitude) is an RPG built to please.

These elements aren't keys to quality ... a game can be crummy
with them and excellent without them. They are, though, a useful window
into the appeal of RPGs as games, into the conventions of RPGs as a fictional
medium, and into the considerations that make the design of a game world
a beast distinct from other kinds of world design.

Okay, the original was a lot longer, a lot ramblier, and went on at the
end into some of the many other elements (power-climb, exploring
social fantasies, etc). The original was a mess a fun mess in its way,
but a mess, and I don't feel like digging into my archives for it anyway.
Worth noting, though, is the absolute lack of the word "the"
in the title. There are a lot more than five such elements; these
are just five I feel are worth attention in that special tummy-rub way.

The reason I'm finally publishing it is because Kenneth Hite is basically
outing me on it. I got an email recently from a guy publishing a I guess
a kind of coffee-table book of game-related observations. Mostly pretty
basic stuff, but it looks fun enough. Might be a good conversation piece.
Anyway, the guy had asked Ken to provide some digestible insights, and
Ken told him about this thing (among others), and -- in a nice way, I'm
sure -- basically threatened to contribute his own version if I wouldn't
agree to contribute mine.

I'm pretty sure Ken didn't mean it to feel so ultimatum-ish (Ken
maybe just wanted to get me included we may not be buds anymore but we
maintain a mutual respect for each others' writing). But, regardless of
intent, it did create a bottom line: see someone else say it, or say it
myself. Okay, then.

So, that's why it's here. This is the micro-distilled version I wrote
by invitation for the coffee-table thing. But why did I never want it to
be here  or anywhere? What's so big and scary about yet another pithy,
piddly little bullet-list of RPG overgeneralization in a world chock full
of 'em? Probably nothing, I know. But ...

Here's one reason I'm uncomfortable with it: nobody I've ever
told it to seems to get that it isn't about good gameworld design,
or at least it isn't meant to be. It's entirely meant as an eye squinted
curiously at those things that make a game the most commercially viable,
which is  as far as I'm concerned at least  an axis unrelated to a design's
value at the gaming table. I'm not an anti-commercial cynic I don't think
commercial viability harms quality, but I also don't think it indicates
it. They're different things, easily conflated in advertisements and proselytizing
but beginning back in the day with Loyd Blankenship and continuing to
last week with that email from the book guy, this has been characterized/responded
to as some kind of game-design or setting-design guide/principle thingy.
It isn't one.

So, I beg, seriously: take heed of that closing paragraph in the thingy
itself. A game can be crummy with 'em and excellent without 'em.
This isn't  at all  about quality (the degree to which it overlaps
with quality concerns is the question it's meant to stimulate
thought on not any kind of conclusion it's meant to encourage).

And yeah, it's an overreaction; I know. But I fret because I love, and
gaming's one of the loves of my life (not on the Sandra
level, obviously, but she's much cuter than gaming). So there's that. Anyway,
hope you like this distilled version because, I gotta say I think I do,
now that it's in front of me. I'm glad it's here, and (despite my kvetching)
I'm glad you're here to read it. Hi!